Google Analytics is very much the Adobe Photoshop of web analytics. It’s extremely advanced with plenty of features but for many, it’s just overkill. Whilst powerful, it’s designed more for users wanting detailed statistics regarding advertising goals, conversions, and other buzzwords that make little sense to anyone outside of the social marketing arena.

GoSquared is an analytics service for the rest of us, providing the statistics and information that we expect, wrapped in a great web interface. I’ve been putting GoSquared through its paces to see if it could be an alternative to services such as Google’s behemoth.

It was a only a little under 3 months ago that we called Draft “The Word Processor for the Web“. A just-launched app that I’d been testing with a few of my colleagues, Draft was one online writing app that’d captured my imagination — and got me to rethink how I write my articles.

If you’ve already tried out Draft, it needs no introduction. Otherwise, here’s a quick summary: it’s an online markdown writing app that saves version of your documents as you write, lets you open and save files on your online storage services, and has built-in collaboration tools to let others edit your work.

That in itself is a lot, enough to make quite the dent in the online writing market. But Nathan Kontny, the developer behind Draft, hasn’t stopped working, and today Draft has quite a few extra features that make it better without making it more confusing or cluttered.

Anyone that’s created or maintained a website will know that it’s crucial to know as much about your users as possible to ensure a website’s success. Tools like Google Analytics are perfect for this sort of task but there always comes a time where perhaps you need a little bit more control.

I came across this little gem a few years ago when I wasn’t even looking for an alternative and found it to be quite useful. I recently revisited it and was pleasantly surprised at how far the project has progressed.

Enter Piwik. With a rich feature set similar to the top website analytics apps that gracefully line the web, Piwik is also free and open source, which means you can install the latest stable version on any server. Read on to find out more!

Knowing how many people visit your site each day isn’t enough every more. You need to know about the people behind those pageviews, see what they’re clicking, and find what’s working (and what’s not) in your app or site.

That’s why you should try out FoxMetrics, our sponsor this week. It’s an advanced analytics app that ties your customers with their actions on your site so you’ll see more than just pageviews. It’ll tell you who visited when, where, and why, in simple reports that you can easily understand and use to make business decisions. You can use it to measure anything – clicks, interactions, which banner ad is driving the most traffic, or anything else you can think of – in real-time.

Whether you’re trying to figure out the best ad banner to advertise your product, or the best wording on a button in your app, or where most of your customers that actually make a purchase are coming from, you can use FoxMetrics to find it. It’s easy to use, easy to integrate with your app, and can work in any app that can make HTTP(s) calls – a website, mobile app, email newsletter, or anywhere else you want.

Go Try It Out!

You can get started with FoxMetrics with a free 14 day trial and see if it’s what you need to get the most insights out of your site or app’s traffic. Once that’s up, you can use FoxMetrics starting at $59/month for up to 200,000 requests, with larger plans available as you need them.

Website heatmaps have revolutionised how major companies, particularly the ones trying to sell you something, design their website. For those of us unfamiliar with heatmaps they’re graphical overlays which demonstrate ‘high’ usage parts of a webpage.

In the early days of the Internet such information seemed unnecessary. But now, people click a lot faster than before with most webpages only open for a matter of seconds. This is thanks to both increased user browsing ability and faster connections.

So with the likes of Amazon making use of ‘Big Data’ to capture your every twitch of the mouse how can us little guys still make a buck from our website. Well MouseStats claim that they offer highly accurate heatmaps to small users. But I was sceptical. Heatmaps have been reserved for larger companies involving expensive software packages. If MouseStats actually can offer heatmaps for your website are they any use to small businesses?

Search engines such as Google provide the majority of traffic to a lot of websites so its important to know what queries bring in most of the traffic to your site. There’s plenty of different analytic services that provide detailed analysis of your site’s traffic – allowing you to visualize what content is most popular and where your traffic comes from.

Making sense of this knowledge is hard work though, and requires some skill. It’s this problem that HitTail aims to solve, and I must agree I believe their claims are founded – HitTail makes easy to understand sense of your keywords, something that’s important for any site hoping to succeed. HitTail analyzes your traffic and then after using their algorithm, it provides you with a tailored list of keywords for you to focus on.

If you’re spending much time on Twitter trying to promote your business, you’d likely like to know how that’s paying off for you. You could track clickrates on links you’ve shared to give you some idea, but social networks provide so many ways for others to share your messages and spread the word about your products, simply looking at links wouldn’t tell the whole story. You need a way to keep up with your followers, so you can know who’s most influential, and see how your messages are being shared and who they’re reaching.

Fruji is an app that facilitates just that. It offers a powerful set of tools and features that allow users of the social networking service to analyse their Twitter accounts to see the sort of stats that they’re achieving. Read on to find out more about this promising app!

Quick Look posts are paid submissions offering only a brief overview of an app. Vote in the polls below if you think this app is worth an in-depth AppStorm review!

In this Quick Look, we’re highlighting Resfly. The developer describes Resfly as a web-based job posting service which allows hiring professionals to easily post a job to multiple leading job boards and social networks. It has all the features needed to manage the entire hiring process including publishing a job, collecting applications through a hosted career portal, and measuring the effectiveness of hiring campaigns with real-time analytics.

Knowing how many people are viewing your site can either be a fun distraction or the difference between making an appropriate amount of money from all your work and going broke. There are plenty of solutions available, some commercial and some free or integrated with another service.

Gaug.es, an analytics tool from Ordered List (the same group that created Harmony) is aiming for your business with several amazing features and a simple, intuitive interface.

Launching a new product or service via the web is no easy task in today’s fast-paced market. There’s plenty of competition and many variables involved in determining whether yours will be a success or failure. One of the metrics marketers use to determine how well their promotional web pages are doing is called bounce rate – the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which a user left your site from the landing page (the higher the rate, the less effective your page is).

Unbounce is an app built to tackle these challenges and then some. With Unbounce, you can create great-looking landing pages with ease, test them for effectiveness in lead generation and publish them to kickstart your business too. There are a lot of great ideas behind this app and they’re well-implemented too – but will they help you turn out a winner of a landing page? Let’s build one ourselves and find out.